Python Backend & Data Engineer

Build the systems that power intelligent products at scale.

We’re looking for a full-time Python Backend & Data Engineer who thrives on solving hard engineering problems, builds reliable systems, and cares deeply about data quality, testing, monitoring, and scalable architecture. You’ll design and maintain the data pipelines and backend services that fuel our Data/AI team, ensuring we can ship insights, models, and features with speed and confidence. If you enjoy building robust systems that quietly run the world behind the scenes, you’ll fit right in.

About Experiencegift

Experiencegift is home to Hotelgift, Flightgift, Traingift and Activitygift. Our gift cards can be redeemed for over 750,000 hotels, 400 airlines, 50,000 activities worldwide and train journeys all across Europe. We believe in experiences over things. Our mission is to enable our customers to spread joy by giving the gift of experiences that can be redeemed whenever, wherever. We’re a close-knit, international team of 50+ people across Amsterdam, London, Athens, and New York.

Winner of the FD Oryx Award (2023) for innovation and growth, and previously ranked #1 in the Deloitte Fast 50, we’ve proven that fast growth and deep craftsmanship can go hand in hand.

What makes the role so great?

You’ll join our Data/AI team, responsible for the data systems and AI products that power our platforms. Within the team, this role focuses on the engineering track: designing the pipelines, data models, orchestration layers, internal APIs, and infrastructure that make reliable analytics and AI possible.

Your work will ensure our data scientists and AI engineers can develop, experiment, and deploy quickly and safely. While your primary focus is backend and data engineering, you’ll also gain hands-on exposure to how modern AI systems are built and operated in production, giving you a strong understanding of AI fundamentals as you grow.

This role is ideal for engineers who enjoy building robust backend systems, like working with data, and want the opportunity to deepen their knowledge of AI concepts while staying grounded in solid engineering.

Examples of what you’ll work on:

• Designing, implementing, and improving our data ingestion and transformation pipelines (ETL/ELT).

• Maintaining and evolving our data flows across a diverse set of databases and systems.

• Building internal APIs and backend services in Python to support analytics, reporting, automation, and AI-driven features.

• Developing tools and systems that ensure data reliability, quality, observability, and documentation.

• Raising our overall engineering bar by improving infrastructure, automation, and developer experience.

• Designing, implementing, and maintaining automated tests (unit, integration, end-to-end) to ensure our backend services and data pipelines remain reliable and safe to evolve.

• Operating and improving the monitoring and alerting systems that keep our production environment healthy, enabling real-time visibility and early issue detection.

Who are you?

We hire for intellect, ownership, and learning speed, not for long lists of frameworks and tools.

You’ll thrive here if you:

• Learn new technologies faster than most can explain them.

• Enjoy the intersection of backend engineering and data engineering.

• Take pride in building reliable, well-tested, and scalable systems.

• Communicate clearly and collaborate proactively.

• Deliver independently, even under ambiguity.

This role rewards intellect, discipline, and perseverance. You’ll be surrounded by people who expect a lot, both of themselves and each other.

Must-Have Requirements

We’re looking for someone who can contribute:

• Proficiency in Python and backend engineering concepts.

• Ability to design and reason about software.

• Strong analytical and learning ability: you pick up complex ideas fast and apply them meaningfully.

• Ownership and drive: you learn, build, and deliver independently.

• Fluency in English.

Everything else (frameworks, infrastructure, tools, etc.), you’ll learn here.

What You’ll Master Here

You don’t need to know all of this now. But you’ll work with, and learn deeply about:

• Backend Engineering: Programming (Python), Backend Frameworks (FastAPI), Object Relational Mappers (SQLAlchemy), Database Migrations (Alembic), among others.

• Data Engineering: OLTP (PostgreSQL), OLAP (ClickHouse), data modelling, ETL/ELT pipelines, data warehouses, search systems.

• Distributed task processing and orchestration (Celery, Redis).

• Cloud Infrastructure: Docker, Kubernetes, AWS.

• Observability & Operations: metrics, logging, tracing, and alerting to monitor and operate backend and data systems in production.

Why join us?

• Co-own architecture and software that will go on to power millions of users.

• Work in a small, ambitious team with significant autonomy.

• Culture that rewards initiative, curiosity, and high performance.

• Ability to have outsized impact in a fast-growing, product-led scale-up.

• Freedom to come up with new ideas and initiatives.

• Young, friendly, ambitious and international team.

What can you expect from us?

• Salary reflective of skills and experience and performance-based bonus potential.

• Hybrid policy (two optional days from home per week).

• Flexibility to work abroad 2 weeks per year.

• Top-tier equipment.

• Pension plan.

• 25 vacation days.

• Complimentary ClassPass subscription.

• Beautiful office at Museumplein in Amsterdam.

• Lunch and snacks provided.

• Fun after work and monthly events.

• Awesome annual trip abroad with the entire company.

At Experiencegift, we offer you the opportunity to work in a scale-up culture where everything you do matters. In our team, you will have the freedom to experiment and evolve your own projects. You will be part of an international, driven, award-winning team and will gain experience in a very fast-growing scale-up environment. By providing a creative, dynamic, and innovative environment, we empower our people for unlimited success.

Ready to make a real impact in a thriving company? Apply directly or visit our careers page for more details. We are looking forward to meeting you!

No agencies please, we manage our recruitment processes internally.